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94 books match the query 'Techniques' and 2 start with u

cover of Unraveling Threads: Essays on Inheritance

Unraveling Threads

Essays on Inheritance

brenda Lin

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

A memoir-in-essays that, in its exploration of language, family ties, and Taiwanese history, distills how the handmade holds memory, inheritance, and the work of caretaking.

“Tactile memory feels like it is the easiest to lose,” brenda Lin writes in Unraveling Threads. But in these exquisite essays, she demonstrates just how the tactile bolsters personal, familial, and cultural memory. From the remnant of a baby’s umbilical cord to the antique hand-embroidered baby carriers her mother collects, Lin shows us how the tactile and handmade connect parents and children, homeland and diaspora, and give texture to caregiving’s many forms. As Lin writes, the radical for thread forms the basis of Chinese characters for women’s work, for practice through repetition, for inheritance. Threads form the mesh in the stent that keeps her father’s heart working. And yuan, the red thread of fate, is the first word she translated for her future husband. When Lin returns to Taiwan after decades away, this time with her young family, the threads of creativity and caretaking become the warp and weft of the continual process of homecoming. These essays on motherhood, language, art, and diaspora will resonate with anyone who has experienced the process of returning to, or building, a home.
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cover of Unruly Tools: Contemporary Artists and the Reinvention of Painting

Unruly Tools

Contemporary Artists and the Reinvention of Painting

Pia Gottschaller

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

The first book to examine the role of unconventional tools in contemporary painting is required reading for anyone interested in painting’s recent past and future.

Painting, often regarded as the oldest of art forms, has been repeatedly declared “dead.” In this original and compelling study, technical art historian Pia Gottschaller thoroughly dismantles that notion, revealing how painters radically reimagined the medium in the years following World War II. No longer confined to the paintbrush, artists began to experiment with new methods, employing found, fabricated, and repurposed objects—as varied as an Afro comb, the human body, and a robotic airbrush—to create paintings unlike any seen before, revolutionizing the course of art history.

  • Begins in 1945 with Jackson Pollock and the Gutai Art Association in Japan and traces the transformation of painting across the globe from the post-war period to the present.
  • Explores the work of thirty-eight contemporary painters, including Amoako Boafo, Helen Frankenthaler, Yves Klein, Julie Mehretu, Beatriz Milhazes, Howardena Pindell, Kazuo Shiraga, and Andy Warhol.
  • Richly illustrated with over 240 images of artists and their creations.

Unruly Tools is the first study of this kind and offers essential testimony to painting’s continued vitality and reinvention.

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